Sign in

File Reviews

For as long as I've been playing Doom (around 10 years now), I've only been truly excited by a small number of things from this community. Things such as Alien Vendetta, when I was first starting to dabble in pWADs. I had no idea Doom could be like that. Back to Saturn X: Episode 1 - the mapset that directly influenced me to really take an interest in mapping myself. UAC Ultra, which to me felt like the first Perfect Doom Experience™ I had come across. Yet another is Cold as Hell, which was the first ZDoom mapset that really made me think about Doom Modding as something that is Doom, but also as something beyond just a collection of maps with (maybe) some additional resources thrown in. lilith.pk3 is the latest and, for me, perhaps the most exciting of all. It's the first mapset I've played that treated Doom not just as a modifiable game, or as a base in which to create custom levels for, but something that specifically called on the relationship I had with gaming, and the prior knowledge I had of Doom, to further add to my own playing experience. The sheer unpredictability of the mod made it so that - for only the second time* in the past few years - I felt genuinely vulnerable and tense while playing a Doom mod. Just like how I felt when I was a kid, when I always felt that visceral, nervous thrill of trying to play the original Doom maps. lilith.pk3's treatment of the resources (the subtle changes to monster and action behaviour, along with its changes to things such as songs) were the first time I'd seen changes made to Doom where the intention was not to please me or make me feel powerful, but instead to unsettle me as a player, to make me feel uncomfortable.
This reason is why I feel lilith.pk3 truly deserved a Cacoward. Whenever I load up a mapset, it doesn't enter my mind that I might experience something other than that same old feeling I get when I usually play Doom: the desire to kill things, to beat the map, and to enjoy whatever sights the modder may have worked away at to present me with. This is the experience I have with 99.99~% of WADs. This isn't a problem, and I'd hate for things to change too much - I mean, I play Doom because it's a great game! I don't want that great game to go away any time soon! As the same time: I'm an artist. I'm an appreciator of art. I seek out new and unorthodox things to expand my horizons, to make me reconsider how I create and take in other artistic works, and to hopefully influence my own artistic process for the better. I feel that every artist - even those who have found their artistic voice and are happy in their current artistic situation - is letting themselves down if they choose to stick with what they're comfortable with, to not expose themselves to new and unusual pieces of artistic expression when the opportunity presents itself.
There are a lot of content creators now in this community, and the natural outcome of this larger collection of modders is that we will have more content to play. This is good. The most important thing for a community of artists is that not only do we have a growth of actual artists, but also a growth of the ways in which we can express our ideas. lilith.pk3 opens the door for content creators to think of Doom modding not just as configuring and piecing together resources (monsters, textures, music, etc.) into a new set of maps, but to encourage us to develop and consider our relationships, as players, to the content already available to us. By relationships, I specifically mean the relationship between us and our knowledge of prior Doom content, and our experiences with what currently exists in the community. Using map 03 of lilith.pk3 as an example, take the reference to The Gantlet, where the player is briefly shown a snippet of a wholly perfect and clean Map 03, before being dragged back into the glitch-filled monstrosity they must fight through. It references The Gantlet not just for reference's sake, but to specifically make us aware of our situation as a person playing a mapset that is much more alien to us than a typical Doom mod - it juxtaposes our sense of the familiar with the overwhelming unfamiliar that we are experiencing throughout this gameplay experience. This is just one example, and it is an example using only the stock resources. With the massive amount of user-made material now existing in the community, the new design space that this kind of design theory opens up can be massive. I say with full sincerity, on the back of this realisation, that lilith.pk3 may be one of the most important WADs released to the community so far.
Does that mean I want another lilith.pk3? Or that I want some kind of trend in mapping towards the glitchy mapset or whatever? No. As much as I really enjoyed lilith.pk3, I've mostly had my fill of it at this point. What I actually want to see - going forward - is more content in the spirit of lilith.pk3. More content that explores the relationship I have as a player with the content I take in when I play Doom. I want intertextuality. I want content that makes me think about the worlds I explore whenever I load up a pWAD, content that allows me to have more visceral and surprising sensations whenever I play Doom. I'm not saying that I will be disappointed with future mapping endeavours that choose to not take these things into consideration, because the things I'm describing aren't the be-all and end-all of future Doom modding. It's probably a new (and not particularly exciting) idea to a lot of people in the community, and at the end of the day we're here first and foremost to play Doom and have fun. When it comes to content creation there are a ton of things that I've not yet experimented with in the community, so I'm in no position to judge other people on what they choose to do with a game that at this point is now 24 years old. However, this idea of intertextuality is something that can absolutely join the mapping brain space of a modder when they sit down to create a new project. Aesthetics. Gameplay style. Choice of source port. The balance of modern vs. classic old school feel, or the balance between realism vs. the abstract. These are the things we broadly think about when we sit down to start a new idea. lilith.pk3 shows us that our project's relationship with the other content that exists around us can also influence how we create our work. I'm very excited by the idea of future projects possibly taking these ideas into account and making a richer, more fulfilling Doom experience in the coming years.
* The other time was Nihility. That shit was scary, folks.

With such minimalistic description I was expecting something that subverts all expectations of a coherent map and folds into a disaster. However, it's not entirely the case. The maps are definitely different, especially in the geometry department, but they play well and have action that never stalls. There are some astonishingly interesting visuals here and there. In general, despite the very "freestyle" application of textures, the maps look well.
E2M7 is definitely broken as the sector floor heights in one place don't form passable stairs where it's clear that they should.

The more fancy crap I see extending the basic Doom engine with confusing gargantu-slaughter maps, scripts, pointless effects and mods, the more I love authors that just stick to basics and deliver. The former rarely add anything to the enjoyment of the game and usually just detract. The latter understand why we love basic Doom and simply don't want or need the extra crap. This wad delivers for the traditionalists. A very solid vanilla friendly megawad with a 90%+ rate of maps that are enjoyable and replayable. Bravo guys. More please. I'm giving this a 5 - because it deserves one when compared to much of the modern stuff.

Quoting the description:
False.
It should say "The first 11 maps", which are also all the maps.
This WAD is like a bizarro Doom 2, an alternate universe Doom 2 where the maps are the same, but different at the same time. Like strangely mangled versions of themselves. You will recognize all elements of all maps because the similarities are striking. Up to and including MAP07 the WAD feels like a bootlegged version of Doom 2. Only since MAP08 the WAD begins to feel like it stands on its own, despite still paying homages and still using familiar elements.
However, for what they are, the maps play well, with some difficult moments happening here and there. Looks are barren, but true to Doom 2. In overall, the WAD is not bad, but it's head-scratchy with its bootleggy-weirdness.